Thursday, April 17, 2014

When Flaubert compared the artist to God, it naturally
followed – as all who knew what Flaubert was up to understood – that theological
ideas and paradoxes would be absorbed and re-oriented in the world of art.

I’ve been reading Meg Wolitzer’s novel, The Wife, which is a
funny and depressing novel, and thinking of a paradox attirbuted to Aquinas
entitled “the paradox of the stone”, or “the paradox of omnipotence.” The
popular version goes like this: can God make a stone he can’t lift? Aquinas
spoke of whether God could square the circle, and shows that this supposed
limit on him omnipotence is no such thing. Others have tried to show the
logical emptiness of the stone paradox. Still, for non-logicians, it is a
rather compelling idea. Either God can’t make a stone he can’t life, in which
case he is not omnipotent, or he can, in which case he is also not omnipotent.

Some paradoxes lead to logically useful devices in the world
of logical theory, but I don’t think this one has.

However, in the world of the novel, the paradox is very
illuminating. Restated, it would be: can a novelist create a fictional novelist
greater than herself?

This question is tickled in various of Balzac’s novels. In
many of them he tells us of genious musicians and sculptors, and we can accept
these things, because we can accept descriptions of works that we can’t see or
hear as part of the novelist’s licence. Things get much harder when we are told
of a great writer. Lucien Rubempré is supposed to be a great poet, and Balzac
even cites him – but Balzac is no Victor Hugo.

However, Balzac never wrote about a great novelist. Proust
did. Proust neatly does an endrun around the omnipotence problem by making
Marcel’s becoming a novelist the novel. It is, indeed, a great novel, but the
story would not have worked if A la recherche was already completed – if the
fictional Marcel was supposed to have written it already. It would be an
entirely different novel, and hard to imagine, since we would have no reason to
credit Marcel with being a great writer for a novel that remains, for us,
unknown and fictitious.

The narrator of Wolitzer’s novel is the wife of a ‘great’
American novelist, Joe Castleman. It being the nature of greatness to attract
prizes, the wife is accompanying her husband to Finland to receive some
fictitious half a million dollar prize that is a semi-Nobel. The wife’s story,
however, is an evil eyed portrait of Joe
– a poor father, a poor lover, a cheat, a slob, and all the rest. Wolitzer’s
character has a voice like an Iris Owens character – scathingly funny. But the
humor chops Joe down to the point that it is impossible to believe he is a
great writer. This is finessed by hints that actually, Joe’s wife ghosts his
material.

But it is here that the paradox kicks in, because although
this is a good novel, it isn’t a great, Nobel prize winning novel. And in a
sense Wolitzer has stuck herself with a narrator who is telling about how her
work has won the semi-nobel prize. That is a huge burden to put a novel under.
It seems, at the very least, immodest, since the inference is that the writer
of the novel is telling us how good she is through her protagonist.

Ulysses nears this paradox too – if we take Stephen Daedalus
to be James Joyce. But here’s the thing: Stephan Daedalus could never have
written Ulysses. He is much too small. He doesn’t have the degree of
imagination that would let him ‘into’ Leopold Bloom. This is one of the ways out of the paradox,
particularizing a character to the point that this character could not exist
outside the pages of the novel, gazing in.

I don’t think that the paradox brings down Wolitzer’s novel –
but it does put the weight of the book on the particulars instead of the
structure. Since, however, Joan Castelman is essentially a comic narrator, she
is not only allowed to create a stone that she can’t lift, but allowed to milk
as much as she can from that ludicrous routine.

Perhaps this is what God does, too, with the paradox that
Aquinas wrapped around his neck.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.